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I am a graphic design student currently working on airplane cockpit displays. I wanted help with choosing a font that would work well in a cockpit environment. I was wondering if anyone here has information about efforts made in designing fonts optimized for cockpit displays.
The closest thing I could find was - The Design of an Optimum Alphanumeric Symbol Set for Cockpit Displays by the Air Force Institute of Technology, Ohio School of Engineering. While I came to know of its existence through the internet I could not get hold of the document to see what’s in it.

most typeaces are designed with sharp corners, which is not very suitable for screens, because screens have smaller resoulution then printed stuff. and they use light, which is the opposite to ink. thus, slightly rounded typefaces might be a good solution, if sharp corners don't look good on the cockpit screens.

however, there are typefaces designed for screen use even if they have no rounded corners.

Gus, thanks for the detailed post. I have read some of the documents you have listed but there are a couple that I have not. Do you have a special interest in aviation or did you just happen to know a lot about it?

The abstract for the "Optimum Alphanumeric" thesis you mentioned refers to a Lincoln/Mitre font, which is a dot matrix font. http://These are the results of a Google search for 'Lincoln/Mitre font'.

http://This NTIS document refers to a comparison of Lincoln/Mitre to another font named Leroy. Lincoln/Mitre was not found to be better than Leroy. I found a zip file for Leroy, but it's in Autocad shx format.

Apart from all that, I found a source that names fonts that probably aren't dot matrix. MIL-M-18012B (324 KB pdf), "Markings for Aircrew Station Displays," says this (spelling variations in original):

"This research focuses on the design and development of a software package to aid display designers in creating fault tolerant fonts and symbology for monochrome dot-matrix displays....The software package developed for the design of fault tolerant fonts, referred to herein as FontTool, operates on an IBM PC..."

Re getting a copy of the "Optimum Alphanumeric" thesis from NTIS, US$48 is pricey. Is there such a thing as an international interlibrary loan? Alternatively, perhaps the AFIT library would photocopy or scan the thesis for you.